Operation Shylock: A Confession

Operation Shylock: A Confession (ISBN 0-671-70376-5) is novelist Philip Roth's 19th book and was published in 1993. The novel follows narrator "Philip Roth" on a journey to Israel, where he attends the trial of accused war criminal John Demjanjuk and becomes involved in an intelligence mission—the "Operation Shylock" of the title. While in Israel, the narrator seeks out an impersonator who has appropriated his identity—sharing the same facial fea... More

Operation Shylock: A Confession (ISBN 0-671-70376-5) is novelist Philip Roth's 19th book and was published in 1993. The novel follows narrator "Philip Roth" on a journey to Israel, where he attends the trial of accused war criminal John Demjanjuk and becomes involved in an intelligence mission—the "Operation Shylock" of the title. While in Israel, the narrator seeks out an impersonator who has appropriated his identity—sharing the same facial features and name as Philip Roth—and used this celebrity to spread "Diasporism," a counter-Zionist ideology advocating the return of Israeli Jews to their European nations of exile. The ensuing struggle between this doppelgänger-like stranger and "Roth," played against the backdrop of the Demjanjuk trial and the First Intifada, constitutes the book's primary storyline. A major concern of Roth's fiction since the 1970s has been the relationship between a novelist's life and work. Though this topic is thoroughly explored in Roth's series of...

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